Practice makes perfect, right? What if you took that notion and turned it on its head – practicing to be imperfect? Sound scary? Let me explain…

Our business community has evolved from an era of expensive communications. Long-distance calls cost over $1.00 per minute and the only option for a face-to-face meeting was spending money on airfare and hotels.

Today entrepreneurs can run lean. Very lean. Skype, Google Hangouts, SMS, VOIP and cell phones have significantly reduced the cost of communications. This impacts how entrepreneurs need to view their pitch. Once upon a time, entrepreneurs worked hard behind closed doors to have a perfect pitch because entrepreneurial communities were limited by geography and it was very expensive to get to a point where a pitch could be made.

You see, the end-goal does not have to be “perfect”. It never really did; however, there was a lot more pressure to being closer to a perfect pitch when the cost of communications was so expensive. When you had a meeting that cost several dollars per minute or over a thousand dollars in travel expenses, entrepreneurs needed to have everything close to perfect. Today, entrepreneurs can pitch their business to more people with less cost, so the paradigm has shifted. Practice does make perfect, and today, entrepreneurs have greater access to peers to practice that pitch. That is what we call Agile Pitching – the act of giving a pitch that encourages dialogue, solicits feedback, in order to continually refine key messages and delivery.

The best pitches I have ever seen is where people may even be perceived as unprepared. Literally tossing the pitch deck aside and having a conversation. People invest in people and the quicker someone can get people to relate to them and not their presentation, the better off the presenter is. Case-in-point is Steve Jobs’ famous launch presentations. No slides. Just him and a picture of the product.

Think differently about the purpose of a presentation deck and key messages. The goal is to constantly make them better, not to put them on a pedestal.